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Many were the causes of this silence. The sportsmen had returned

from the forest talkative enough, but when their ardour had

cooled, and they thought over the hunt, they realised that they

had come out of it with no great glory: was it necessary that a

monkish cowl, bobbing up from God knows where, like Philip from

the hemp,91 should give a lesson to all the huntsmen of the

district? O shame! What would they say of this in Oszmiana and

Lida, which for ages had been rivals of their own district for

the supremacy in woodcrafts? So they were thinking this over.